Feeding the birds is also a form of prayer.
Prayer is the soul's sincere desire. Your desire is your prayer. It comes out of your deepest needs and it reveals the things you want in life.
Fools! You think of "god" as a sentient being. God is the word used to represent a force. This force created nothing, it just helps things along. It does not answer prayers, although it may make you think of a way to solve a problem. It has the power to influence you, but not decide for you.
One really ought to be afraid of self-torture. But it tempted me. It begged. The dark place that my mind was fast becoming blends, in my memory, with the dark womb of church: the chant, the fugue of prayer, the strange erotic energy that carving a very small cross into my thigh with a nail had brought.
If we want to read and to pray the prayers of the Bible and especially the Psalms, therefore, we must not ask first what they have to do with us, but what they have to do with Jesus Christ. . . It does not depend, therefore, on whether the Psalms express adequately that which we feel at a given moment in our heart. If we are to pray aright, perhaps it is quite necessary that we pray contrary to our own heart. Not what we want to pray is important, but what God wants us to pray.
When you are praying alone, and your spirit is dejected, and you are wearied and oppressed by your loneliness, remember then, as always, that God the Trinity looks upon you with eyes brighter than the sun; also all the angels, your own Guardian Angel, and all the Saints of God.
In the prayer time, the battle of the spiritual life is lost or won.
I don't think there's such a thing as a selfish prayer. Prayer puts you in communication so you can talk about whatever you want to talk about.
The most powerful movement of feeling with a liturgy is the prayer which seeks for nothing special, but is a yearning to escape from the limitations of our own weakness and an invocation of all Good to enter and abide with us.
I always begin my prayer in silence, for it is in the silence of the heart that God speaks. God is the friend of silence-we need to listen to God because it's not what we say but what He says to us and through us that matters.
Prayer is a thought, a belief, a feeling, arising within the mind of the one praying.
Thanks Darling for the beautiful flowers and all the prayers. Now can you just get my puppy past security?
God prefers bad verses recited with a pure heart to the finest verses chanted by the wicked.
I prayed like a man walking in a forest at night, feeling his way with his hands, at each step fearing to fall into pure bottomlessness forever. Prayer is like lying awake at night, afraid, with your head under the cover, hearing only the beating of your own heart.
The more you praise, the more vigor you will have for prayer; and the more you pray, the more matter you will have for praise.
[The right] may never bring prayer back to schools, but it has rescued all manner of rightwing economic nostrums from history's dustbins. Having rolled back the landmark economic reforms of the sixties (the war on poverty) and those of the thirties (labor law, agricultural price supports, banking regulation), its leaders now turn their guns on the accomplishments of the earliest years of progressivism (Woodrow Wilson's estate tax; Theodore Roosevelt's anti-trust measures). With a little more effort, the backlash may well repeal the entire twentieth century.
Just as a prayer may be merely a mechanical intonation as of a bird, so may a fast be a mere mechanical torture of the flesh.
Well that's basically how we launched Sherwood Pictures, and with our films, we sat down and we had a long list of specific things that we were praying for God to provide, and then we would just deal with all those things in prayer first, and then when we went out and began knocking on doors and calling, it was clear that God was going before us and providing the way and sending the resources.
Prayer without heart is a waste to time.
When we pray for any virtue, we should cultivate the virtue as well as pray for it; the form of your prayer should be the rule of your life; every petition to God is a precept to man. Look not, therefore, upon your prayers as a method of good and salvation only, but as a perpetual monition of duty. By what we require of God we see what he requires of us.